Portland’s most venerable music institution paid homage to one of the city’s greatest treasures Saturday night, as the Oregon Symphony celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Portland Japanese Garden with Toru Takemitsu’s “From Me Flows What You Call Time.” The gesture was lovely and the offering very nice, but as sometimes happens with cross-cultural gift-giving, the result just missed the mark.

Composed in 1990 for another commemoration, the centenary of Carnegie Hall, Takemitsu’s piece is essentially a concerto for a group of five percussionists and orchestra. It was a bit of an odd choice to honor the garden, widely regarded as the most authentic outside of Japan, in that little of it is idiomatically Japanese. It opens with a flute imitating its Japanese counterpart, the shakuhachi, and Japanese temple bells atop timpani are part of the vast battery of percussion, but its conceptual basis is largely Tibetan, its instrumentation draws from myriad international sources, and Takemitsu himself was more inspired by French and American composers than by Japanese tradition. (His “November Steps,” for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra, might have been a more obvious choice.)

That said, it was a mostly terrific experience. Five percussionists — OSO principal Niel DePonte, Sergio Carreno, Luanne Warner Katz, Jonathan Greeney and Michael Roberts — played in tight ensemble from five stations on the stage, making improbably captivating music given that the piece is a sort of anti-concerto, eschewing the kind of wild display that’s a hallmark of percussion solos from classical concertos to classic rock.

Takemitsu didn’t go wild; he went deep. Little cymbals quietly shimmered in the opening section; bamboo rattles had a brief conversation around the stage; and chimes suspended above the audience closed the piece magically above hushed basses. The closest thing to a cadenza involved DePonte softly tracing the music’s central theme over and over on steel pan. The orchestra was like the wind — an occasional breeze with harps and celesta, a gust of strings.

But while the soloist group and the orchestra were cohesive in themselves, something missed in the meeting. Neither in his remarks from the podium nor in his direction did Kalmar show any great enthusiasm for the piece, and great moments, however numerous, never coalesced into a compelling whole.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” offered after intermission, was similar. The depiction of the sultan’s wife who staved off her beheading night after night had many compelling moments, not least of them the repeated solos by concertmaster Sarah Kwak in the title role, intensely intimate moments that shifted the perspective from the epic stories to the storyteller in her bedroom. But much of it was merely workmanlike and polite, getting things essentially right without any sense of urgency. If there were ever a piece to play as though your life depended on it, wouldn’t this be it?